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In 1964, Pinkie Brown, a sociopathic member of a Brighton gang, murders Charles Hale who has himself killed the gang leader, Kite. He befriends Rose, a young waitress who witnessed the gang's activity, to keep an eye on her. She falls in love with him. To prevent her being compelled to give evidence against him, he marries her. Ida (Rose's employer and a friend of Hale) takes it upon herself to save the girl from the monster she has married.

Rowan Joffé was originally uninterested in the project, which as first proposed was to be a remake of the film, but after re-reading the novel, Joffé "fell absolutely in love with the character of Rose" and convinced the studio to let him adapt the novel directly.[5] Joffe later explained why he did his own adaptation of the novel:[5]

The novel was worthy of a contemporary adaptation. In fact, it makes it almost more dutiful as a filmmaker if you love the novel, to bring it to life without the restriction of censorship. I mean, a lot of the Catholicism was cut out of the original film because they didn’t want to offend Catholics... there are aspects of the film where if critics were to be honest about, and few of them have been certainly in England, that the 1947 version is a rather tame adaptation and certainly fails to do justice to the character of Rose, because the original black and white was made in a period where we were culturally and politically very patronizing to women.

Apropos to the location, Pinkie kills Spicer by shoving a stick of Brighton rock candy down his throat.

Brighton Rock received mixed reviews from critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 53% of 89 critics gave the film a positive review, for an average rating of 5.7/10. Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score from 1 to 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, gave the film a 57 based on 24 reviews indicating "mixed or average reviews." According to Stephen Holden,[11] "Mr. Joffé has turned Brighton Rock into a full-scale film noir with the stylistic undertow of a more modern British gangster movie. As potentially lethal as the thugs may be, they are also slightly over-the-hill small-time bookies who seem anything but invincible, and the movie gives each a complicated personality. Andy Serkis is outstanding as the oily Colleoni, a smirking sybarite and crime lord with playboy airs." Holden notes "Mr. Riley, now 31, is a little too old to play a teenage gangster, and it throws the movie off somewhat. If Pinkie's recklessly impulsive behavior is that of a frightened teenager, Mr. Riley's slick hair, facial scar and cold, wide-eyed stare suggest a seasoned smoothie who has watched a lot more dirty water slosh under the bridge than any teenager could have witnessed." Nevertheless, Holden concludes "By discarding most of the theological debate [found in the book], the movie is no longer a passion play but a gritty and despairing noir. That’s good enough for me."